Back home in Cheyenne, Wyoming, when I was working at the local counter-culture record store Ernie November, we had a racy poster in the window of some near-naked ladies and a short man covered in bubbles. Cowboys and tourists were always complaining (to the cops mostly, never facing us inside, of course) but my manager Keith, in all his heavy metal defiance, refused to back down. Until Mayor Spicer got involved. He acknowledged that he could not force us to take down the poster legally, but it would be in the store’s best interests to do so, wink wink. Old boy politics are how it’s done in mineral-rich Wyoming, and I learned a valuable lesson in knowing when to give up the fight.
Quitting in general is an acknowledgement of failure, regardless of the circumstances. With video games, quitting is especially onerous, given the monetary and hourly investment. Others have it worse, of course. Pity the poor tester that is damned to headbutt a pony at the same wall a thousand times for 18 hours a day just to make the ship date. If only she could quit! Shovelware is the kind of game that only a sadist completes, but what does it mean when someone paid $60 to put nearly 40 hours into a title without any sense of engagement or achievement, just going through the motions with little interest in completion? There are those who can drift away from a game, move on, start something new. I and many others prefer to see things through to the end, so to quit a game is a decisive act of cutting away.
Quitting is made more difficult when the game is Mass Effect 2. Universally adored, held up as the foremost single-player space opera experience for current gen hardware, I could find nary a negative word about it outside of a comments section. Critical acclaim is the authority figure hanging over me for ME2, demanding my allegiance and respect for such a fantastic title. Who am I to say no?
The word of others isn’t enough to force enjoyment, however, and though I’ve put much more time into the game than I would have liked I don’t necessarily regret it. I’ve been thinking a lot about ME2 and its various elements: sprawling cast of characters, in-game expository text, near-innumerable worlds and pretty space to explore, side-quests and main-quests, skill trees and stats management, conversational options, operatic narrative, and every now and again the many corridors through which to strategize yourself and your party. What amongst these delicious binary supplements could I possibly find fault in, let alone quit over?
Like many titles, there are several “games” contained within Mass Effect 2. Of the stats/equipment/mineral management, the strategic third-person shooter, and the choose-your-own-narrative, it’s the gamification of the story that most disassociates me.
The game-based aspects of the otherwise potentially compelling narrative include paragon actions, renegade actions, teammate conversations, and non-player-character subquests. After my forty hours with the Normandy, two distinct linear paths became apparent: the universe against you, Commander Shepard, which is the clearly constructed and linear element of the game; and your role as Shepard with regard to the various subordinates you collect, where you can play your relationships with these people in a good, evil or neutral capacity. Through character creation, conversation trees, and cutscene-applicable actions, I am meant to be engrossed in the narrative as a participant rather than observer. This isn’t exactly a new goal on behalf of Bioware and many other publishers, and other smarter and more eloquent writers have gone on about the subject of choose-your-own-adventure style video games and multiple endings, so I can speak only to my own experience.
Surprisingly, I am no Space Commander. I’m just a man lookin’ to shoot some shit and get lost in a tale. As an individual then, when I am thrust into a situation between warring races or a monetary dispute on some planet, I am presented with conversation options that don’t exactly jibe with my own personality. How could they? There are currently many more personalities than the game is capable of presenting conversational options for. Instead I am given a boilerplate of responses, tinged with Commander Shepard’s point of view, which, after every conversation, serves only to remind me that I am not Commander Shepard. This is first hinted at when the game nudges me to be concerned about Shepard’s facial scarring, a byproduct of the recomposition of his entire cellular structure, when really I think they look pretty sweet.
Later, after a confrontation between two female crew members who do not get along, I am expected to break up the fight and pick a side. But I don’t really care for either of them, because deep down I know I can always choose the other side later in an alternate dimension/play through, and as such neither is the established narrative. The more I nudge myself into the corner of one or another, the more I feel like this sort of narrative structure is built to serve the game when I feel it should be the other way around. The game is the narrative, and theoretically, the player is writing it, or at the very least assembling it from the scattered parts occasionally presented before the player. “What would you say?” ME2 asks, and does its best to provide. As a player and reader of this game I lose all sense of imperative with this nebulous set of choices though, since the story is trying to be everything to everyone. The problem is I wouldn’t really say nor do any of the things you’ve offered me to choose from (except for maybe those grayed out ones, which are inaccessible because I have not chosen paragon/renegade side with enough conviction, or am required to play again from the beginning).
The wall between player and narrative, which this sort of story-structure and narrative-gameplay seeks to tear down, is reinforced as the player realizes that there is no narrative without her interaction, and because of the limitations of recording audio, writing multiple conversation paths, etc., the seemingly infinite nature of the player-character creation process becomes starkly hobbled. No two characters seem to interact without my presence. No one talks about the other members, unless it’s a scripted catfight that you must break up or something that serves the locked storyline of the “Universe vs. Shepard”, and even then it’s about choosing sides for a blip, then the story goes back on course. What is sold as an unlimited narrative quickly reveals itself as not only linear, but devoid of nuance, because the player-character is supposed to contain, experience, and relish in all possible narrative dramas and tension. Because this game wants to be all things, I am left with cardboard character types, dialectical conversation options that restrict true depth to two degrees of reaction, and what most ejects me from the feeling of immersion: slithery wandering eyeballs and nigh eternally-uncomfortable character models.
Mass Effect 2 presents the narrative as something completely engrossing and engaging. As there is an uncanny valley in reaction to computer-generated, almost-lifelike human models, there is something similar in the narrative that tries to approximate human free-will. A game can’t model free will for the player, it can’t even do it for the non-player characters, and the harder it strives to contain all options for the player the more obvious the seams in the narrative and disengaging the few available options. Rather than given the outline for a story with a few blanks I am allowed to fill in, I feel more engaged with a narrative “on rails”, so to speak. Forget the illusion of choice and tell me a story that I can relate to, not an endless sea of meaningless options that the player is obligated to slog through.
These types of open ended stories become exercises in narcissism, which, maybe, all games are fundamentally. To have it thrust into my face so blatantly feels pretty strange. All of your side characters exist only to be utilized by you. When your assistant tells you that one or another of the crew members isn’t feeling too hot, and they open up to you, a new mission is created through which you will again choose paragon or renegade. These sidequests ostensibly serve to open up the backstory of your many co-universe-saviors. But I am not allowed to learn about these characters, and their actions, and how they might influence the narrative, because I have to bring the paragon/renegade action to the table. I have to influence every point of divergence within the storyline, but since Bioware can’t possibly compensate for each of these points and their many possible outcomes, my companions feel hollow and meaningless. I am meant to believe that I am leading this narrative, but my choices are inconsequential. I can force this character to act in a moral or immoral way, but since both options exist and can be read by the player, it makes the character hollow and uninteresting.
Ultimately, this is why I quit. There is no story without character, and the characters are ill-defined so that the player can ostensibly experience the narrative of their choosing. A thousand possible tales live under the shell of a rather generic interstellar blockbuster (with copious amounts of background exposition). Really, I wouldn’t be so wound up about the story if it wasn’t so much dialogue to wade through, mirroring the amount of time spent resource-hunting, aka holding down the left trigger while moving a set of crosshairs around a wallpapered planet waiting for the squiggly lines to rumble my controller. You have to do this to get Palladium and junk, which you need to make your character’s weapons and biotic (aka psychic) upgrades. Fine, I understand the concept and it is sound, but also, it is tedious. It’s worse than tedious, as it taps into the desire to be completionist as well (the same desire that is tapped by the multiple choice conversations). This is the video game equivalent of paying your bills, but with a barebones interface and a tinge of haptic response as a reward which does not equal the amount of time invested.
Oddly, Fallout 3 attempts a lot of these same open-ended actions in its storytelling and causes a lot of the same friction, though I feel it is more successful at the bottom line. An old creative writing trope is that one should “show, and not tell” in their writing. Fallout 3 to me is a game that excels in showing, through environments, props, and set pieces. I don’t feel compelled by reading about an ancient race or the history of a space station in the pause menu, but coming across a corner of a near-obliterated DC museum where empty tin cans and broken toys surround a tiny skeleton, suddenly the wasteland comes to life for me.
Don’t mistake me; the wasteland is no paradise of gaming with its waxy faces and immersion-breaking glitches. Rather, it’s a flawed but expressive world that presents narrative threads for you to experience, but at your pace and interest in a world crafted to let stories emerge. ME2 is sparse environments peppered with assigned reading and forced conversations I would avoid in real life, occasionally broken up by space battles. As the game world attempts to contain galaxies, I find it frustratingly limited.
This wouldn’t feel so monumental if the game wasn’t universally heralded as a masterpiece of the medium. Every aspect of ME2 touted as an example of the power of gaming feels, to me, like a shortcoming. There are people who want their games just to be games, without narrative, and those who crave a profound exploration of what it means to be human through gaming, and both opinions are valid. I feel that video games can accomplish both, but not through a “Choose Your Own Adventure” model.
A satisfying narrative isn’t about telling every story in at once, but letting one story do all the work for a large, abstract idea about the nature of human existence. For me, Mass Effect 2 has failed in this regard, and as a result I have quit this metacritically near-perfect game. I have fought the good fight against the Reapers but can no longer stomach it, despite all my gamer instincts crying out otherwise, despite Amazon, who keeps rejecting the game as a trade-in, despite the universe as a whole. I may not able to shake the discs but my resolve to quit cannot be deterred.
Levi
